


feverish & feculent

by Quinchy Quiver (scvrvb)



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Body Horror, instead a filth of guts and hyphens and hysteria, non-linear narrative or non-narrative narrative if i'm to be candid, occasionally approaches prose poetry, this could very well be construed as 'filth' but not the filth you're probably accustomed to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 10:48:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14851307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scvrvb/pseuds/Quinchy%20Quiver
Summary: Little experiment poking around inside Shinji-brain during one of NERV's experiments inside Shinji-brain, or also maybe during one of his several hospitalizations. Shinji couldn't say, neither can i.A cowardly even dangerously inflated exercise in nonsense! Tries to track or keep up with the velocities sensoria scenes of a fever dream. A daft romp with words. Very very mild character work happening, even less grounding in canon. Scarcely situated in Evangelion, really only marginally, if you squint & extrapolate & trust me.





	feverish & feculent

**Author's Note:**

> FORMAL DISCLAIMER: sincerely earnestly truly do not know what this thing is, or where it came from, only that it left me violently & in a white heat, and i haven't anywhere else to house it. Be gentle

 

Shinji pitter-pattered, moving now in the place of the present, the unassailable and the scattered, a sludge trudging. Any glance to a previous, into a past, yielded but isometry: the same tumid perennial-present. ‘Nothing before this,’ commanded a speaker, far off, ‘no movement back, think forward, here now.’ Catwalk, strolling, blank. Plain sterile grids, humid interior, faint whirring. He would continue ‘till he came upon what waited, gnawing, ahead.

 

Pits and pricks spoke past the isometry: the sensory had, moments ago, suffered some swift vertical wretch, had, hardly covert, discarded the furtive with a laugh that rubbled enormous. Hadn’t it? The body could only wobble, banished or amputated. Movement, supple and irregular, intimated only by a blur in the uniform lattice. A ripple chugs, in a jesting beaded fashion, along the grid.

 

Anxiety like a tin vibration, whose early frequencies read like: ‘unit, unit one, where had you split, how reliably?’ a paranoia whose musculature extends past the obscene, the catastrophic, into the revelatory, the Sacred.’ He was through with shivering words, their silver glass duplicity. They are material fitted for machines, eldtrich memory tools, for microphone-speech of lump and the ‘repressed,’ ninety percent of it feedback. Cast them out. 

 

This speaker turned then to, in a nasal falsetto, a recollection passage of seedy spongey clump, rolled in hair, with measures of cornstarch. It claimed — suspiciously — an account that might vindicate, wash the situation of some of its opacity (it wishes to see the Thing). In opposition, favoring designs for security, it shimmies away from shock, sending the grey matter into rejiggers; it exercises a slithering, blockading, choking, streams damed and occluded. She is a living something, doting, even maternal. It’s here she prevents this blackwater awareness, without the sheen of deliberation; the making of a mind a thing of conflict, and of selectivity. Prone to circumvention, fraying, making or remaking by trauma-Thing, known and ignored all the same. She is this feedback, vertebrae sinews, gnashing screech, a razor wind to avert the ears (she is, only insofar as she does not see the Thing).

 

 

* * *

 

 

Clank thrice. Rubber sole on metal.  
Lattice, aluminum, piston-teeth. in their tiny task, proffer now paltry refuge, a world of solids and fermionic decoupling, of collisions that stick. Clink Clink Clink. It sustained its regularity, sustained him. This register promises contact, wrapped in a little bow, dutiful lovely conciliatory. These promises float without effort, blessed by a levity, wings of solved crime, pinions delivered by justice, cast in whatever substance boasts antithesis to mold. They are not like the limbs or like anyone he knows, they know only virtue. The ears receive their whispers with a similar rectitude. Being so close to the head (the jelly-circuit; make note of this, she’s a regular), they don’t dare lie.

 

He flash-thinks then of the anyone he knows, mostly of the privileged holders of name tags clipboards other authorities, those that behold him — especially of big Him, Him, outer flattened Him — from above.

 

Unit one … where had occurred, when would he — wherewithal with all, where had unit one — with where the splitting? Desert recollection, dust-bunny slow crawl, was making headway, a split a split or a conjoining, a suction up and out, into-past, with and wherewithal unit one? Catapults islands wave-crests of memory in nuggets, over and against his isometry of the perennial-now. Something in his head crunches and his feet stumble. The stubborn horizontal mark, a pathetic etch, cursory, splits to reveal opaque impossible distance. His jelly-circuit oozes, sways. The stomach expels, teeth buzzing. ‘He’ wretches.

 

Vom-slime sprawls onto the steel. No message here to judge, nothing to be salvaged, gathered, unlocked. Forfeiture now appeared busty, slippery, unconditionally sexy to the eye.

 

Before rising to persist onward, a bough shivers to smear its fat diffused end, where the branch splinters into its five (five?) lilliputian derivatives, across the steaming upchuck, the work of a devil-creature, to be sure. If it were clever, if it considered use, humor, prudence, it might leave a notation in the alizarin surface for any pursuers. Or maybe prudence pooled in knowing this corridor would be empty, empty for the next eternity or so — gums not strained salivated — before the next rapture, the nth Impact (what is only, in our warm glass, a speed change).

 

Auxiliary stations in the epidermis, sensory garrisons, (monopolizers of nerve), erected to maintain a vigilance, surveilled now for little envelopes of any alien smuggled error. They intended to repel contraband marauders of whatever persuasion endeavoring to invade the sensorium. Alien. alien. alien. This word required a tongue shape he can’t even approximate. Wherewithal might the alien be discerned with all the alien-ware, where. Where was he now, wherewithal or not?!

 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

What occurs next, as plain to the nexus organ (the lizard brain, a cauldron of bubble-flesh) as the labored breathing below: a shift. (cataclysms taste the best when without warning). Where there once, only moments before, shone the decentered pitters of a guilty rubber stumbling along steel, there is now only the infant squealing of stuffed plush giving way to some greater material. The shift delivers sounds ghastly and unhiemliche, seeming creatures of a foreign sensibility; their plunder’s only previous appearance being the softening of a pillow, the chest-compressions of a teddy bear. This new squish sent rumors of a dastardly aberration. His same etch, dripping spud, is thrown wide to choke-shriek.

 

He was not had he ever been in that lattice on that catwalk, he knew now. The sensorium and its fortresses reeled to place him, in the real-here (sponge tissue, chevon foam, pig ground, was all it could manage). Sputtering, writhing, a super delicious inflammation. You’re now the fish fed to captive prizes, flailing in your stupid bucket. Metallic and frigid and stupid. Thrashing in which-way movements, attendant twists in ocular field, each producing new arrangements of the same hungry heaving maw.

 

The physiognomy, carved, cratering lineament, with slights in contour, shapes passing — anxiously — as form, contorted impossibly into a center, creases crinkles furrows, weight collapsing the features inward, by a magnetism nearly necrophilic in stature, the corpse’s mug now a scribble, a cadaver left with only scrawls. Waterboarded ligaments, like totally. The eyes, quivering and vulnerable, were plugged and totaled, retracted, burrowed, out of fright — where where where where.

 

A thought, a possibility, coagulated, a lump in the throat, a description of such could find articulation only in the most rotund of ellipses, in obfuscation: what if, amidst the cross-firing within the systems’ balky instruments, which curve often toward the mystical, whose height shrinks all others, which Father and the others seemed to have managed some beguiling mastery over, of which Eva, pornographic in hyperbole, in might, sits atop — there occurred some fracture, processing error, an accidental alchemy, a mangling of interior soil. Had, in this case, Lilith neglect fidelity to her covenant with Man, threatening that which assures an individual home for every resident of Guf, which guarantees an apparatus, bound up in flesh, through which One (just one?) may act. And if broken, where now?!

 

Was this a rapture singular in its receiving party? Cries, maybe for mercy, might have eked into taut bowels where the soma still lurched, diseased, had his whole form not met a paralytic pause. This wretch into cotton had not been the whims of the highest, ticking clock, nor the mistake, the abuse, of the progenitor, but the particulate inspissation of his decentering, his plummet from the privilege of subjecthood, codified not even by a moist gesture of dirge. Once he had, whimsically, forfeited his initial blessing of pomace, warmth, anatomy, he couldn’t return to the easy benison of childhood. So mature, lucid, this thought seemed, remarking with pride, the jelly-circuit nearly missed its barbarous implication.

 

 

* * *

 

 

‘Real and not.’ It occurs in glimpses, slights, wave crests then all at once, real has nowhere to go, but the opposing lane steams stews teeters in manifold direction. Real is indivisible, total, those that wriggle off, they’ve so many worms to straddle, so many forms to milk. Fictions, myth, mason jar of knowns, newcomers like the virtual or simulated, twisting into insubordination, before an absolute. Maddening many claim. Whole, holes. ‘Too many insurgents! can't keep them all straight.’ He thought absently that such rubbish digressions ought to be more fun.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Something only placeable as lightning, akin to its categorical specificity, struck so swiftly as if a piss-pot-porridge-pop. The husk fried. In its cloud, a courier is revealed, his introduction monopolized first by an apology so sincere, blush almost boils to the surface, amid the gunk.

 

This message comes from past the Guf, it begins, consider, with due proper urgency, this particular maxim: some subjects are so basally infected, inflicted with so cardinal an ailment, they may only receive description as such: an unusual danger in axis, a wholesale rupture of the sensorium, by which the operations, responsibilities, conduct, of persons, on which the arrant question of humanhood rests, is threatened. It is here that one may arrive at some total disability. The body is isolated from its responsibility of manufacture. But bearing the inexorable weight allows no substitutes, rather it is something the self must endure or perforate in frenzied solitude.

 

‘What’s this? Delusional if the maxim thought pertinent, surely mistaken!’

 

No, there is no other image of decenteredness so totally undiluted, a poster-child, as it were. Ragged, edges a bit too compromised, wherein the commune has no choice but to retreat from oneness, no recourse of reclamation, of scorched flattened mythology and all. Even now, in our speaking, your splitting proceeds, irrevocable, gifting forays into wriggling, all outside the messes of speech or its indexes. You orbit a center only in proximity to the appearance of another. It organizes itself against an alterity, a frame by which to measure your distance. (an abstract so amorphous it would scatter without its passage through the Negative). This other also finds its nucleus, mutually antagonistic, a dance. Like this, the one always contains the absence of the not-one, (the one can never hold itself, for the held is never the holder) the altern, a trace of incomplete presence, of a compulsory opposition.

 

‘Then why all the hysteria? If the subject’s ineluctable entry into tumults in the immaterial marks a castration, a violent wretch, then why does this coincide with the moment the cries are silenced? Is the cleaving of realness (invoking its double sense) into psychics, our shared sacred triad, just a foolhardy blunder into inventions, without gravity or arrant truth, which only mushrooms the distance from our natural facticity? Would we, should we, given the wherewithal, reverse modernity’s project, instead enterprise toward the beastly, the wisdom nugget we’re to take inwards, forfeiting all obligations? Is the primate more whole?’

 

Couldn’t be said with any certainty. My counsel is not to stray to the animal or a kinship with soil, but away from the assaults, bickering, that destroy any consensus or the joy of the monolithic.

 

The myth of the singular takes effect only long enough for a desperate flailing kind of pain to expand, freeze solid, then sublimate. In this time it finds weight among the canals fitted for welcoming the parades of vermin, carved and carried by a clandestine wind. Ache enjoys a binding quality, hairy and static: a dollop, sheet metal. Before there is time for more stiff dribble exchange — just when he was rising to enjoy the company of this dear caustic creature — the singing stops.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Worms in the belly shriek, gracelessly burrowing, collide with a resilient calcium-chum. Flopping appendages, that once conceited an uprightness, sense this with an even more perfect certainty: might have the body’s remaining infantry not yet surrendered to the cunning appeal of upholstery.

 

As if as rejoinder, scrawled in some curt script, scribbled runes, legible only by a curious film now discerned along their curvature, betrayed by its anxious hum, appeared a note of ostensibly urgent proportion (this notation could only be fondled by the twin field lights perched anterior the golden jelly-circuit, and these sister spectators alone). It said, in a harshness, a clarity, so resounding it seemed to buckle and quake the whole iron fabricate:

 

you walk now in a machinery of oedipal inchoate dimension, erected as if under the command of a flailing appetite only accustomed to the affirmative, not deterred by worldly limits.

 

A pause, another moment before the realization grips him in paroxysm and recognition. What remains of the sprawled matter (elaborate steaming remains) of his jelly-circuit floats outside even the most generously expanded empiricism. After what seemed weeks croaking horizontal (where?!), a hole opened up beneath him. He awoke in white, in cloth, almost in air.

 

 

* * *

 

 

In bed, finally sedentary, he took inventory of his ailments: first, wobbling eruptions of the belly, a mutiny of the flesh, welts in the hideous kidney, broiled, precocious but delinquent. What had occurred, in the moments that followed — measured by the meaty intimate device palpitating ‘vitals’ — brought more crises in his provisional command. The fragile coalition of his (body) buckled, morale careened farther away from the unitary. Now all the jelly-circuit could manage is to call on these organ-insurgents, their mushrooming egos and digressive agendas, try to operate with a proxy cooperation, a monad, even if only in appearances.

 

In the spirit of this mission, the jelly-circuit (grey nucleus) stumbles, dazed, continues toward an exhaustive index of symptoms, an arrant scan. Before this exertion reaches even fifty per cent completion, they gyrate, catapulted, thronging all available monitors:

 

1\. the possibility, can neither be corroborated nor ruled out, of an abrupt total transmutation of the trotters into a soft upholstery, occupied exclusively by a baleful cotton; it should also be considered the plausible handiwork of the sensory organs, vehement in their disobedience, an illusion — psychotic no doubt — of their making; he dare not lift his sheets to be sure

2\. malformed by thirst, the bones cry out, the tissues desiccate, leaving a crunchy brittle residue, hovering over disintegrated

3\. spasms of the muscle, whom’st are unwilling to listen, to even acknowledge the Dasein of reason

4\. a loss of faith in the promise of cleanliness, so severe it returns the mass, especially its borders, its exterior film, to a point of resignation, unbothered by a filth whose toleration leaves no other explanation save debilitating catatonia, requiring perhaps years of inculcation to return the self to a place of recognized worth. Curdled shit stains, unknown purulents, the tickle of teeming insect legs.

5\. a piercing of the aural cavity, whose shrill metric might have exceeded ‘fucking painful’ towards a magnitude fitted only for annihilation, where the constitutive indivisibles of the solid jettison amiability, kinship, to vibrate alone, hysterically so

6\. A sensation outside the range of deniability: the actual melting of the self into some soft ridiculous putty. Its sick tangible sag bore resemblance to something of a boiled milk of old, left in only the company of toadstool, pickled saprophyte

 

Notification of a revolt in the gut, loud and regular, interrupted this index, allowing no mobility of the neck and no recourse in the way of blindness, mandating a rigidity with no available clemency. Further still, a disease of the sister sponges, threatening their prized spherical character, gnarled not by any dense disfigurement but instead a softening in the contrary direction, a likeness to phlegm, a nucleolus hogging some viscous treasure, peerless in flavor, immaculate in moisture.

 

 

* * *

 

 

‘He was him’ seemed marked with any weight only because he wasn’t another. Something so frank and without contest, the possibility of any otherwise stretched the jelly-circuit. Here, he would have to settle for such ripe tautologies.

 

Hours in immobilized apprehension, frigid, gaping out onto the invisible. Beside him, with a start, a monitor hums awake. Its wash of sickly artificial cools an aberration from his stale ontology of red. He wants to kneel before it, figure his limbs in submission, paws clutching at its edges, gathering all plausible bubbling in the bones to implore aid. A console of clinical medical utility, surely. Even still, its devices almost threatened in their frigid contiguity with the alien plumb around him, asphyxiating quietly (asphyxiating as in suffering such? Maybe perpetrating such against the mingy blood-hull swallowed therein?)

 

Panacea dosage due! dust, shock that silly grey organ into clarity! back towards a whole agency and purpose! still the vibration that now imperils derailment!

 

Doubts abandoned their swelling in the thyroid in favor of an unassuming dance of relief, the more willful of his two branches — the one whose musculature had not yet atrophied to a dastardly root, twisted toward the moon-monitor— striking the console’s lone button, the swollen tube having to reach awkwardly above the jelly-circuit husk, straining his calcium scaffolding, its tender commissures, spraying the vicinity in perspiration. He felt decapitated.

 

An arm-apparatus that seemed so nakedly, so endearingly, to endeavor to a resemblance with the organic hums with movement, detaching from its parent machinery with a whir, an unassuming composure, against which suspicion would only seem petulant. With what could only be applauded as limbic dexterity, it performed a move registered first in acute warmth, in which the prong utensil of an almost invisible thinness punctured the outstretched branch’s pasty tube, now baldly exposed.

 

No organ seemed particularly heartened by this, though, the sensation of being pierced squawked with an inflamed ripeness. Shinji, not friendly with, but certainly no stranger to, bodily rupture and mutable edges stiffened and peered at the incision: yellow liquid found the surface, bubbling from the slight wound, parading off the stricken funnel, sharing a kinship only with urine, carrying forth also its stench, a brackish custard soon followed, spreading around the wound, a drunken mold, spilling into his bedsheets, already stained. A syrupy loam, meaty by all appearances, cohering with a dastardly mucilage, never meant to be observed exterior the skin — or only by vivisectors of a bare zeal obsessed with locating the carrion’s inner curiosity, however abject, however unseemly the remains.

 

The puncture spread his flesh ribs, peeled back miles of sickly hide, the sing song heat flattened into a whole plate, an acre, of coagulate and diarrhea, sweat of some nowhere origin peppered the shell, fragile. ‘Inflamed’ not adequate for the scene. Honey, what encrusted crunchy misshape assumed his arm’s place: rotten, arrantly fucking rotten, this not-arm refused any light, especially of warmth, stealing it away, deferring all luster. You drowning yet, girl?

 

An austere fit of concentration, a silent oath, wrought desperately to weather witnessing this shambling atavism, this nightmare. Be a lamb, he pleads to himself, oh a plumb pliant sheep, and just bear this one.

 

A million tons, innumerable really, of the twisted inverse of ‘affirmative’ resound after that flop. Is hearing, contact with and being in the aural province even a remote priority? Clarity, the jelly-circuit fantasizes, is a place of bliss: a fortress far off, past sickness, past doubts, swallowed maybe.

 

‘What’s this device? What’s it feeding me?’ While the thirst remained intact, it couldn’t necessarily, reasonably, be assumed that high fructose corn syrup was totally outside plausibility. Might instead, something of the phantasmagorical, or at the very least, sympathetic to its sensibilities, now be making a home in his insides. Lends credence to the startling solution of the entrails in his basin. No, maybe here lies Father’s charity, His tango with redemption. He means to snatch back the clock, reset its wrongs, He wishes to return me to a sniveling density, a homogeneity, all coiled potential, who — if not the design of hyperbolic mother — would have been gifted with a peerless health, would have been sacred. Before, amidst laments of a contiguity or the sick similar planar habitat, cries of its wide angle, its curvaceous neglect for motors— demanding, hello! — to strike up good will with the pleasures of another, not even licensed to compete with Him if the enterprise orbits the satiation of one adult animal.

 

His gut-harvests were consistent and plenty, thinking now of ages before the mutiny that crippled him (nostalgia for togetherness, the togetherness he had known?).

 

‘Oh well now there’s a sense of filth, of the filthy, too acute to discount, too plausible to seize without a moment of careful swollen shimmying lateral-thoughts. That is to say, there is something of a manner, gritty weighted solemn as it may be, of a dish of palatability in excess. He had never really apprehended the lesson of moderation in lemon zest that all must confront in the moment at which adolescence quakes.’ So hydrated, so compelling in surface, so sexy, it just had to be gutted.

 

Onlookers might have bore witness to a stint of a strident bravery, of an ostensible kind of clemency, had he had any visitors. Impressive, relative to this gravity of a whole eternity felt on the inner lash, flaky, unshaved. Amidst ribbits, vibrating, he placed his remaining faith in the artificial length of his fingernails, in fugue. Instead he remained crooning, suffused with this film of bile, intimate now with stillness, with the elasticity known only by the most seasoned of taffies.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He wished now for any marginal sensation to, goading a few tremors, perforate what seemed a bastion of paralysis, impenetrable by all measures. Impossibly, an arm appeared in frame to peel pierce (‘maybe it only escorts, ushers gingerly the derma out of the way, as to avoid the hassle of puncture?’) almost swells in its giddy feeding, praying without recourse for a chance to retch the appendage, whats here a silly protrusion, vulnerable meat, weak and regrettable, is coerced into opening wide, teeth bared but harmless.

 

For a moment it stops being an arm, only a lard or amphibian (an improvement really, does wonders for his starpower), and here it sheds all claims to a place among his property. All cells too preoccupied with this assault to contemplate if his entry had liberated or further entrapped. It explodes as entrails, slithers as bile, as freshly plainly permeable as the Child, infant in its becoming. He could not peer upon the zone where his arm had up and abandoned him, diseased in all its necrophilia. Its flaking gooey sight soliciting words like ‘chuck,’ ‘spew,’ ‘gouge.’

 

Shinji lay now in a machine without response, a dim assisted homeostasis. A voice again towered now like some guardian, ‘turn back’ it urged, pestilence a seal of its command. ‘What once lay ahead, on your present course, is rubble ruin. Spindly, ere to disloyalty.’

 

A bit disappointed, pusillanimous, t’was agreed, they were only pranks only a tipple strip accumulated only a curious case of teasing little cruelties too cumbersome for our baby vertebrae pal. Giggles.

 

He knew to cross examine was to concede weakness, to betray a be-speckled indoor soft-spoken wantonness. Even while playing it as comedy, albeit a tad robust, his recently liberated arm had seemed to careen, to sputter stick in amputation, running laps around, curling uncurling, spitting into his wounds. Castration, maybe. Giddy, sing-song. Deafeningly, those behind his bone-desk claimed it might lose marrow, if he wasn’t careful.

 

A glass beside him of cherry sodium rind was replaced without ceremony by the preposterous juvenile potion of oil slick. Its fugacity active, traceable through boil ripples, arteries entangling in a python scheme, flesh butter slopping by the spoonful. White prongy defenders stalemated in self immolation. Flesh muscle bone isn't here but for its crass melted imposter. An alien onto its non-alien attachment: erasure, loss. There grows now a spore of some magnitude, silly fungal purulent. Another limb made waste. To wait now only for a break, a shimmer, in his comatose past his present limbic disaster.

 

 

* * *

 

 

First registered was something of a pestering, a bit like pain, if the medium for this registry could be secreted outside a person (like a pitiable fungi whose enzymes flow out from its stasis siphon up grub, also extend, like milk that sends back strength and also its anathema, collating its health). Curious was its shape, how it managed its signal, suggesting somehow the spreading of a paste, but crisping mystery in concealing surface, under irritated tongue, like a sponge. A largeness set in, near explosive, where it could only be rendered that he’d suffered some infiltration, or many, some creature had displaced in burrows its hiccups or its moments of disease. Had some injured animal clutching sputtering under its laceration slithered into him to place its weight?

 

Sure some wakefulness but like an insect, gnarled and small and bellicose, you couldn’t grasp it, include it in any transaction, place it beneath any sort gravity. It would instead recoil, struggle around the knuckles, slurp along the arm, tickling. Still, without its pretext, there sailed now some split: a flick in the mind, a writing without surface. He wishes now only for non-presence and stillness, a thinking which contains longing for its own defacement. He tried to wander back towards a glimpse of the previous, any wider recollection, anything that might bless him with even remote direction, a quest maybe, a call out of this black heap.

 

Then clicked the drip, this animal dripping, some recognition stirred: nightmare wave cracking to reveal sack pelt stench, careful questions. had this thing, now sprawled in grey and ache, consumed the limb that once operated there? If this not an arm, his arm, where had it gone? oh but a rotten line to be redrawn, total guts spilled, for there seemed to billow a spit confusion at the property strata. Attentions to the shoulder, its sniveling hop sockets groaning to give jest the sodden answer: yes attached, yes belonging.

 

Total wreckage: dread pools, gut smack, hideous texture, oh what insidious a yelping of ripping threads with its paling stone stiff; this fungal mess of flesh, flaking butter knuckle mass, had but a wretch of line, muscle among its crunchier interior snapped, a twig made jelly.

 

Smacking of odor, this beast was his. Never so much dread to be inheriting poverty, rotten wood and maggot snack. He wished again to be with his originary lack, the purity of phantom. He’d been robbed of its belonging, then of its non-belonging, left with a most wicked kindred, a sunken broken leaking egg of an arm, like rubber. It’d been sucked of its prime moisture and replaced now with a kicking heavy oil, fixed with a flaccid prokartyioticism. Cackling, he dared not move!

 

 

* * *

 

 

It seemed hours before grey men of stout persistence reordered their path, a rewiring scheme, a network attuned to fortitude, enabling the red puss apertures to make safe passage, allowing the sternum to falsely adjoin with collarbone, into turgid shoulder and down along near the beast in question. Its thin plasticity a rumor of flake abrasion and distended beef, a certain uncertainty principle struck: this mutilation or its image could not be held in mind at the same moment as the naked fact of its belonging among his limbs, the facticity of its his-ness incompatible with its hideous mangle. His cells refused to claim this carcass as its own. Even in purblindness he saw:

 

wretched, exhumed, the missing clump lined with fungus, attached only by stubborn unpeirced derma at its perimeter, if the limb was capsized the flesh might spill, a viscous bisque, the consistency of a elderly tapioca. He thought wildly of mourning this pasty deliquesced pulp, now pooling, running slovenly into his bedsheets. Even if his jelly-circuit (which was now practically stone) hadn’t yet settled on the idea, amnesia a maker of detritus, a re-arranger, it can’t erase this, for one animal-divine glare would remind him, like bubbles or phosphate.

 

The jelly-circuit ricocheted, quaking the head, its haughty gobbet, stripping its propriety for naked hysterics to galvanize the rest of the husk towards alarm. Skeleton and company convulsed in opposition, in a deposition so adolescent, borne mostly out of boredom or steam.

 

It sees — not as if written in flames, which would be to first blacken but then cleanse, flattens and steers away from the earth, but in the belly of a woman, rendered in abscess, scripts of a wordsmithing pestilence — with only a passing lick, perfunctory flavor, a putridity that outlives, extends further, taller, outside that word, lower than any word. By rotting cones, a glimpse at the basest netherworld, without order or bottom.

 

And yet, in its ripple, its plainness, there lay bald and without meaning the nude form of his origination, a portal to a before, prior his split, impossibly proceeding the object’s, the sign’s, the father’s, castration.

 

‘A macabre circus tossing pits of ailment, mutilation, gratuity,’ he rationalizes, but met with no parallel orange dots and silence from grime below, it fails to land. He blacks out.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There is but a soft little fleshling of person remaining, taut and shacked and remote, oblivion slick. Prospect of recourse, wherein he [Shinji, by most accounts] returns or escapes, dreams of some somatic break, made for fantasy in his swollen and lead-like stillness.

 

At the crest of wake, before breath could rise, gurgling in the throat, a tar a seed, blackened, there appeared, laying on its side, bulging, a portly beef, living cooking ham, chewed rinds, the twisting likeness of a swelling pig, sickly with its belly exaggerated. It seemed equal parts cellulite and rot. Speaking in tongues of gasps, sputtering and coiling, it belabored an offer, a garbled barter: a gift rather, spits it. Arm lost, a bummer, but … They’re interrupted by hound smell and barf mouth. Forget it, you’ll be out. To be poisoned bled dragged thronged with the wild. Your face in pieces. Your legs stuffed toys. Voice moistened by swollen gums, hanging jaw.

 

His arm stretched to retrieve what was then slackened devoured meat, but landed unharmed in abstract land, cowering as a shuddering surrogate, angular and siphoned, still a sexy bird. Flashes, a whole sight — a staircase that threatened upwards! Then supervention, toppling back down the steps, back towards the vile and its affiliates, after fourteen years of silence.

 

Claws cruel to take it from you without grimy breath of bits of agency, hand in water making splash. To act to see to think a triad of fruits a fun game known images transparent surfaces! Will let you taste this at least, one day.

 

 

* * *

 

 

A lumbering, amphibian somehow, slothing into its place, knotted slack, a crab half smashed, on sanitized linoleum. Ache fell arrant and uniform on his skeletal taffy. Somehow intact, gummy, raw and clueless, he shivered.

 

 

 


End file.
